Grit and Character

Education for Self-Government

Happy Independence Day everyone!

When Alexis de Tocqueville reflected on his travels in America, he noted that Americans had been shaped, and were still being shaped, by the land itself. “The American,” he wrote, “struggles against the obstacles which nature opposes to him.” It was in the unforgiving school of experience, on the frontiers and homesteads, that American character was forged. It was a character fashioned through struggle and suited for self-government by that challenging formation much more than by book-learning. Tocqueville observed that “true information is mainly derived from experience; and if the Americans had not been gradually accustomed to govern themselves, their book-learning would not assist them much at the present day.”

At the heart of the American educational project is the obligation to form future generations of citizens capable of carrying forward the task of self-governance. But as Tocqueville indicates, this capacity depends upon a certain character in the citizenry, one which, at least in the early years, was forged in a hardy proximity to the land itself. Acknowledging that the material conditions have changed considerably since the founding, as have our educational methods, are we certain that the character formation necessary for a free people no longer includes a robust experience of and struggle with reality? Before answering, it is worth considering how the greatest of the Founders was himself formed.

George Washington was less book-learned than most of the Founders, and some of them — men who had enjoyed formal European educations and attended the most prominent American universities — thought this disqualified him from prominent service to the new republic. Writing to Benjamin Rush in 1812, John Adams was blunt: “That Washington was not a Scholar is certain. That he was too illiterate, unlearned, unread, for his Station and reputation is equally past dispute.” We all know how decisively Washington proved this judgment to be an error. In fact, the elite academic background of many of his peers might have disqualified them from the kind of work the young republic, with its harsh geography, independent citizenry, and looming threat of war, needed in order to thrive. It was work for which Washington, and his formation, were uniquely well suited.

Photo by Walter Martin on Unsplash

Washington’s father died when George was only eleven years old. His two older half-brothers had attended the Appleby School in England, but the untimely death of his father meant George would not enjoy the same privilege of formal schooling. Instead, he moved in with his half-brother Lawrence and spent his teen years working on the estate at Mount Vernon, learning from his older brother, and engaging in a self-directed course of study that included practical geometry, etiquette, and social propriety. While many young men of his generation were heading to Harvard or William and Mary, Washington was bivouacking in the Blue Ridge Mountains on a surveying expedition or trekking through the winter to western Pennsylvania as a major in the Virginia militia.

In his Histories, Herodotus describes the Persian practice of sending its young aristocrats to the frontier of the empire, where they would learn to “ride, draw the bow, and speak the truth,” far from the morally corrosive influence of the court. This is a fairly close description of the formation Washington received. While his peers engaged in the sedentary, formulaic paideia inherited from Europe, Washington was learning to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth — a formation whose rigors and austerity, you might say, matched the occasion.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The intellectual heritage for which many of his peers are famous is fundamental to the American project. I’d be grateful if more of our children received even a fraction of that heritage and formation. But in addition to largely abandoning those classical intellectual roots, we’ve also forgotten Tocqueville’s keen observation of the need for a certain hardiness, even roughness, in shaping characters capable of self-government.

What would it look like to reinvest in American hardiness? Does it require an actual frontier? I’d suggest not. However comfortable our technologies have made contemporary life, the American landscape maintains its rugged beauty and the invitation for its people to resemble it. But we will need to treat the body and its encounter with the real world as part of education, not an interruption of it. A boy who has spent a week on a long hike, carrying what he needs on his back, has learned something about himself and his country that no classroom can supply. A girl who has ridden a horse or built a fire for warmth has taken on a weight that schooling of the usual kind never asks her to bear. Manual work on a farm or a job site, wilderness travel, competitive athletics pursued seriously, apprenticeship to a capable adult — these are not extras to fit around the edges of a sedentary education. They are the grit and chisel that shape our children’s characters.

One might fairly ask whether anything we devise today could accomplish the same level of formation the founders received. Can we shape characters as rugged and hardy as Washington’s? A week in the backcountry is not a winter crossing to Fort Le Boeuf, and a summer job on a farm is not a three-year surveying commission on a live frontier.

But to this question there are two responses. First, just because we cannot match the details and degree of that kind of physical experience does not mean we should give up on the whole gambit. Recognizing how formative it is should encourage us to seek it where and how we can. Second, while it’s true that we can as little re-create Washington as we can his specific experience, the essential qualities still exist, and we find them prominently the closer into contact with unmediated nature we go. These essential qualities consist of real and enduring stakes as well as the fact of the indifference of nature to our feelings. While the particulars will look different from Washington’s time, I believe we can still confront and learn from these essential qualities of nature. (take this footage from the Iliad Athletics camp for example…)

Schools and other youth programs should prioritize direct encounters with nature, and the rest of us should fight against the risk-aversion and over-protectiveness which tend to cripple the young and the organizations which serve them. Take the Boy Scout’s fire merit badge, for example. In 1911, a twelve-year-old could earn it by demonstrating his ability to be helpful in combating an emergency: ability to carry a ladder, drag an unconscious person to safety, and assist with crowd control. The 2024 requirements focus exclusively on safety and academic abstractions such as naming the “parts of the fire tetrahedron” and “describing a fire safety-related career.” There is no essential reason we could not return to the 1911 standards, and if we want our young to resemble Washington, then I suggest we do so.

Washington’s formation was not incidental to his greatness; it was the condition of it. The boy who spent his teens on the Shenandoah frontier became the man who held an army together through Valley Forge, who refused a crown, who walked away from power twice. The republic he founded has outlasted every regime his contemporaries would have compared it to, and it has done so because it was built by men formed to bear its weight. If we want citizens and statesmen of the kind it still requires, we will have to form them as he was formed — in struggle with the land, with real work, and with the truth.

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I spent the last several days in the field running a camp focused on outdoorsmanship and functional fitness…a camp that strives to realize the aspirations detailed in this essay. Appropriately, the article was first published while we were outdoors, sweating in nearly hundred degree heat, carrying logs, navigating cross-country, and sleeping on the ground. You can see the original at Lyceum.